On the Watch (11.29.20)

On the Watch
Mark 13:24-37
November 29, 2020
First Sunday of Advent
Rev. Elizabeth Mangham Lott
St. Charles Ave. Baptist Church

THE HOUSE LIGHTS GO OFF and the footlights come on. Even the chattiest stop chattering as they wait in darkness for the curtain to rise. In the orchestra pit, the violin bows are poised. The conductor has raised the baton. 

In the silence of a midwinter dusk there is far off in the deeps of it somewhere a sound so faint that for all you can tell it may be only the sound of the silence itself. You hold your breath to listen. 

You walk up the steps to the front door. The empty windows at either side of it tell you nothing, or almost nothing. For a second you catch a whiff in the air of some fragrance that reminds you of a place you've never been and a time you have no words for. You are aware of the beating of your heart. 

The extraordinary thing that is about to happen is matched only by the extraordinary moment just before it happens. Advent is the name of that moment. 

…if you concentrate just for an instant, far off in the deeps of yourself somewhere you can feel the beating of your heart. For all its madness and lostness, not to mention your own, you can hear the world itself holding its breath.  —FB, Whisting in the Dark

———

This is how Frederick Buechner describes this first Season of our new year in the Church. Advent is that moment when “The extraordinary thing that is about to happen is matched only by the extraordinary moment just before it happens.”

In a time when we want answers, Advent gives us metaphors.

This is how our story begins

While it is still dark

While the world is still in chaos

While our lives feel precarious

While the governments and rulers of this world seem in shambles

While the world itself may as well just come to an end because you’re not sure how much more bad news you can take

This is the moment into which a word comes

to be on the watch

to stay awake

because something is happening

something is coming

that changes everything

that is bigger than the rulers and the governments and our little lives and the whole world itself

News like that is so tremendous, enormous, unfathomable that only a metaphor can hold it

No matter what the headlines may be telling you, the light is emerging in this perpetual darkness

No matter what lies your despair may whisper to you, love is going to win over hate because that’s the very nature of love. It wins. Every time.

That’s how the first Sunday of Advent can begin with apocalypse and hope, side by side. The metaphors are revealing what is truer than what we see. And for today, it starts with the glow of just one, small candle.

But it seems there’s a catch

You had to light that candle yourself. We had to light these candles ourselves.

Especially this year, with all of us scattered across dozens of places. To be on watch, to keep awake, somehow invites our participation in this new thing that is happening. This thing that is waiting to be born or to shine amidst darkness or to grow like a fig on a tree somehow relies on us to be part of the process of welcoming or ushering or midwifing or guiding it into our world.

It is the very opposite of answers and certainty

We are asking one another to stay awake for images and symbolism and hope and love.

We are committing ourselves to lighting a candle and believing something extraordinary is behind and within that light just as we commit ourselves to believing something extraordinary is behind and within us.

Believe me, I get it. For those of you desperate for answers and certainty, it may feel absolutely worthless and infuriating and woefully inadequate to hear that the answer in the light and in the waiting and in the darkness and in the watching and in the breath of this moment and the one to come. What a bunch of malarkey, as the president-elect would say. 

When what you are holding in your hands feels so broken that it might not ever come back together again, when the world feels like it is too close to burning up to ever be healed, when the bad news keeps coming and the ache is too much…maybe the very last thing you want to here is to hope in a symbol for the thing that is to come.

But that glimmer and flicker and sparking light of hope is all I have to offer you as I sit beside you in this very same fragile darkness and keep watch alongside you.

Blessing When the World is Ending, Jan Richardson

Look, the world
is always ending
somewhere.

Somewhere
the sun has come
crashing down.

Somewhere
it has gone
completely dark.

Somewhere
it has ended
with the gun,
the knife,
the fist.

Somewhere
it has ended
with the slammed door,
the shattered hope.

Somewhere
it has ended
with the utter quiet
that follows the news
from the phone,
the television,
the hospital room.

Somewhere
it has ended
with a tenderness
that will break
your heart.

But, listen,
this blessing means
to be anything
but morose.
It has not come
to cause despair.

It is simply here
because there is nothing
a blessing
is better suited for
than an ending,
nothing that cries out more
for a blessing
than when a world
is falling apart.

This blessing
will not fix you,
will not mend you,
will not give you
false comfort;
it will not talk to you
about one door opening
when another one closes.

It will simply
sit itself beside you
among the shards
and gently turn your face
toward the direction
from which the light
will come,
gathering itself
about you
as the world begins
again.

Welcome to Advent, my friends. May we sit beside one another, among the shards, and gently turn toward the direction from which the light will come. Today, this is our work and this is our hope. Amen.